Building Leverage in the Age of AI

Many of you probably caught my recent appearance on My First Million with Shaan and Sam.

For those who haven't, I shared quite a bit about my journey.

In today’s newsletter, I wanted to share a summary of four core ideas from the podcast:

• How $3.65/hour taught me my biggest career lesson

• The Valley of AI Agents: What’s coming next

• Results as a Service (RaaS): Beyond just software

Reader warning: For most of these responses, I tried to tailor around My First Million's audience. But I promise there's still some juicy AI agent info.

Building Your Leverage Machine

One story that seemed to resonate (and that I've been thinking about a lot lately) was about my early career rejections.

Ever been rejected by Pizza Hut? I have. And Big Lots too.

But here's the interesting part: That string of rejections led me to a night shift job at Red Roof Inn, making $3.65/hour. And that minimum wage job taught me the most valuable lesson of my career:

If all you do is spend 100% of your time converting your labor into value and don't increase your leverage, you're never going to get anywhere.

And since many of you in the leverage frameworks I mentioned in the podcast (yes, I used AI to summarize the comments again), here’s a snapshot of a simple framework from my Apple Notes:

The Valley of AI Agents

Fast forward to today, and I'm seeing a massive leverage opportunity: AI Agents.

Just like apps transformed mobile phones, agents will transform how we work. Think of them as digital team members who can handle complex tasks. Where I had Brian, and he had me, every future company will have an army of AI agents.

As many of you know, I'm building agent.ai – the #1 professional network for AI agents (Or as Shaan likes to call it: LinkedIn for AI agents).

Why? Because the future workplace will blend human and AI talent. You'll have teams where some members are AI-based teammates, and others will be real-life, carbon-based humans.

Us humans can currently hire other humans on Fiverr and Upwork right now. But we need a marketplace to hire AI agents.

And I also shared what I think is coming next on the podcast: AI agents that can go out and hire other AI agents.

Results As A Service (RaaS)

If you've been following my newsletter, you might remember that I recently wrote about the evolution from SaaS to RaaS.

I talked about it some more on My First Million, and I'll try to sum it up again here.

People don't want software — they want results. Just like "people want holes, not drills."

I've been building software products for 30+ years, and I've seen the evolution:

• First, we had traditional software you installed

• Then came SaaS (Software as a Service)

• Now, I think we're entering the era of RaaS (Results as Service)

A good example would be if I sold you legal software to analyze a contract in the real estate space that will give you commentary on whether this matches benchmarks or, even in the VC world, a term sheet. You don't want the software — you want to know if the terms are fair.

There will still be software being used by whoever is providing the results as a service (that's how the thing gets accomplished), but the way it might be packaged and sold, might end up being RaaS.

Here's what excites me: Never in my mind has it been easier to get to those results.

AI agents are democratizing work, making it possible for anyone to build leverage at scale.

Your job to get ahead? Start connecting those dots and building that leverage. Look at the results, and figure out what you need to create them. And before, where you needed to hire twenty people to get started, now you can have an army of AI agents to handle a lot of the nitty gritty for you.

Want more insights? You can watch the full My First Million episode here:

Hope you find it useful.

-Dharmesh